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Vanderbilt University’s building on the ruins of the California College of the Arts will bear the billionaire’s name
Vanderbilt University’s new San Francisco arts and design campus will bear the name of Nvidia co-founder Jensen (Jen-Hsun) Huang after the billionaire committed millions to the institution.
The university announced this week that the AI chipmaker and his wife, Lori Huang, gifted $75 million to establish the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang College of Art, Architecture and Design.
The controversial campus will replace the nearly 120-year-old California College of the Arts (CCA), San Francisco’s last remaining private art school. The beloved nonprofit institution, which grants bachelor’s and master’s degrees across artistic disciplines, was purchased by Vanderbilt amid financial struggles caused by a decline in enrollment and a growing budget deficit.
The Huangs donated a $22.5 million matching gift to CCA in February 2025 to help stabilize the institution’s shaky finances. However, not even a full year later, CCA announced that it would cease operating after the 2026–2027 academic year, and that the Potrero Hill campus would be subsumed by Vanderbilt.
Not everyone in the local art community is happy with Huang’s donation. “These billionaires would much rather play God and remake our art schools in their own image than support a 120-year-old legacy fine art school,” Lindsey White, a San Francisco-based artist, educator, and CCA alum, told Hyperallergic.
“In both CCA and SFAI cases, billionaires with zero experience in the arts have taken over major real estate, leaving local artists, educators, and workers in a dystopian nightmare,” White continued. “Sadly, it seems our local government didn’t see the value in saving the last fine art school in Northern California either.”
California Governor Gavin Newsom had worked to secure a $20 million public grant in 2025 to keep the private institution afloat despite significant opposition from state lawmakers. At the time, the governor argued that though it was atypical for the government to fund a private college, the state should fund CCA to safeguard its cultural sector amid Trump’s attacks on the arts. He later expressed shock at the school’s closure, but critics said he should’ve seen it coming.
Huang co-founded Nvidia, a manufacturer of graphics processing units (GPUs) now widely used to power artificial intelligence programs, in a Denny’s restaurant booth in 1993. In May, the chipmaker reached a valuation of $5.5 trillion, the highest in the history of publicly traded companies.
According to the university’s announcement, the Huangs donated the large sum out of their belief that “creative practice [is] one of innovation’s most essential engines.”
“Technology expands what we can build,” Jensen Huang said in the press release issued earlier this week. “Art and design determine why we build it. Together they shape civilization.”
In an op-ed about the closure of CCA in the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this year, local gallerist Griff Williams warned that “corporate interests seem to eclipse all else in San Francisco.”
“Mayor Lurie, the closure of the California College of the Arts is a tragedy for the city, not a ‘win,‘” he wrote. “It’s another blow to the legacy of the heroes who made San Francisco unique: Joan Brown, David Ireland, Bruce Conner, Hung Liu, Hank Willis Thomas, Dewey Crumpler, Robert Arneson, Manuel Neri, Harrell Fletcher, Jim Goldberg, Viola Frey, Ted Purves, Dodie Bellamy and Susan O’Malley, to name a few.”
